The Color of Lies

109 minutes2013

After a schoolgirl is found raped and strangled in the woods, suspicion falls on the professional painter (Jacques Gamblin) who welcomed her into his home for an art class and was the last person to see her alive; as he fumes and frets, his lovely wife (Sandrine Bonnaire) slips into an affair with a successful journalist (Antoine de Caunes) who may be the real killer. Like so many drawing-room mysteries by French director Claude Chabrol, this 1999 feature is just an excuse for knowing appraisal of the bourgeois characters and their world, with barbed dialogue and multiple layers to every relationship. Unfortunately, the crimes that drive the plot, including the sexual assault and murder of a child, are given so little emotional weight that the movie sometimes feels like Murder, She Wrote. In French with subtitles.
ByJ.R. Jones